Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I support what Ms Uí Mhaoláin has said about underoccupied houses. In my view, there is a total misunderstanding about this in urban Ireland. I live most of the time in an underoccupied house. There is no question or doubt about it. That is except for when the children come home and they bring their children, the grandchildren, home. We are then an over-occupied house, and the whole place is full. That happens in summer, on bank holiday weekends, at Christmas and so on. You find that very few rural houses are empty all year, even when they are underoccupied. When I was growing up, I lived in Dublin, and we never slept over. There was no point. All of our relations were nearby. However, when your family comes home to a rural area, they obviously stay with the parents in a lot of cases. One problem we have continuously in County Galway in particular, I do not know if it is true in counties Donegal, Mayo and Cork, is it is very hard to get a preplanning meeting. More importantly, where they refuse, it is very hard to get a post-planning meeting whereby people can meet the planner to find out what changes would have to be made to get permission the second time. People are spending a lot of money trying to address the issues only to find out they are still getting refused and that is a problem. Finally, the Údarás Act is in the process of being amended at the moment. My view is that a provision could be put in whereby certain functions, at the direction of the Minister, could be carried out by the Údarás on an agency basis specifically on non-Gaeltacht islands. Population wise, the non-Gaeltacht islands are about one quarter of the total island population. When the Gaeltacht and the islands were initially put in one Department, the idea was that for socioeconomic matters islands could be treated exactly the same whether they were Gaeltacht or non-Gaeltacht. We need to have the same power now to get on with the job, and to set up an AHB with the power to buy and sell land.

On Ms Uí Mhaoldomhnaigh's point on title, we put an airstrip on Inishbofin. It had to be subject to a compulsory purchase order as it was commonage. One of the interesting by-products was that people had to get title to get their money. Some of them used all of the money they got for the CPO to get their titles up to date, which was useful for farming and ownership purposes. I think on most of the islands it has happened because of farming grants. Where it has not happened, I think we need to look and quantify it. I would be interested to find out, roughly speaking, how many landholders on the islands do not have clear title to all of their properties, including their land and their buildings.